or One who works in, operates, or owns a mill, especially a grain mill.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Marauders

Thanks to a good friend giving me some hosting a while back, I figured I'd encode my own, smaller web-safe version of my Marauders film and upload it. I wasn't too happy with the compression Youtube did to the video, and the video was kinda cropped off on my blog, so instead;

I hope you like it. I'm not too pleased with it because I know for a fact I can draw a hundred times better than that, but I left the project a little to the last minute so I didn't have time to really stress over the drawings unfortunately.

Since then, however, I've really been pushing the character designs for use in my next project which is a fair bit more ambitious and (so far!) a lot more fun, too. I feel comfortable sharing a little here now of what Julian looks like now;

Thanks! I wanted the art style to be a little warmer and softer than the flat retro stuff I was moving into, so I went back to the very first sketches I did when I started designing, and then looked at Friends and Heroes and a whole bunch of Disney stuff (Aladdin and Atlantis mainly) and tried to develop a softer style, but still simple to draw for animation.

I really enjoyed the video. I did feel it was a bit style over content, but what great style.

What I mean about content is that it felt like the details could have been given more meaning and context - e.g. Why is it relevant that the driver is sleeping? Can you use that in the plot other than as mere background? Why are the marauders attacking? What do they want? Is it really a good idea for the boy to simply release the trucks/carriages that the train is pulling? etc. etc. The vagueness really undermined the sense that this was happening in a real setting, for me.

It did look absolutely great but, even for a short film, the plot was weak.

A lot of that I've already taken into consideration as it was a number of issues that were brought up in the projects feedback. I was also very lucky I was being marked on the stylistic qualities more than anything else, hence the shorts attention to such things.

The problem with a short film is trying to balance how much the viewer needs to know about whats going on, and its a very hard thing to get right I'm learning.

Another issue is, ironically, I have spent a -lot- of time fleshing out the cast of characters and the universe they exist in, and explaining just what is precisely happening was going to be complicated because they aren't just after money or something. The current short I'm working on is the same characters although pushed further, and hopefully it will provide a slightly less obscure view into the world - especially because I'm being marked on the characters and stuff as well!